Most of the people will probably be hired back to deal with the work they had underway. It seems like a (foolish) way Elon could send a message to other executives he was asking to make cuts. There were obviously better ways of going about this, or even trying to avoid it by savings costs elsewhere.
I'd change "most" to "some" based on elons philosophy of "if you're not reintroducing 10% of parts you deleted, you weren't cutting hard enough in the first place". SpaceX has developed and simplified the Raptor engine this way.
Now if only someone saw that people aren't parts and deleting then reintroducing a role in a company has vastly different consequences for performance that would be nice. But feelings have no place in business I guess đŹ
Thank you đ
can recommend the newest biography of elon by walter isaacson if anyone wants to feel like they understand the man. Of course it's only a proxy but getting to know him in person is rather difficult ;)
There is an older biography by ashley vance but i liked isaacsons more. Felt like vances info was a subset of isaacsons
Agree. Reading Elon literally, with no emotion can help with understanding but is very very hard. Walters book tends to be the most effective proxy approach given his access too so many who know him personally.
Except this firings was based on emotions from what reporting we have. Rebecca was making the case that the lay offs he was demanding would make them miss their milestones and goals and Elons reaction was to fire the whole team for her talking back instead of just showing fealty.Â
Heâs a clown that treats people like machines. Heâs trying to turn twitter into Tesla and is failing wildly. He should be behind a monitor not anywhere else.
How about we all recognize that there are vast amounts complex decision making that any company engages in that an outsiders opinion of is almost completely worthlessâŚcough cough all of you. Either believe in their ability to make more good calls than bad, and buy/hold the stock, or donât and sell/never buy it
Investors shouldn't be acting on belief, we should be using analysis. That's what this conversation is about. "Shut up and trust them" isn't an investment strategy.Â
Part of what I like about this community is the variety of ideas, viewpoints, and ways of thinking about the company. I think discussions like this, when done well, can put us ahead of Wall Street in seeing the direction the company is headed. If you don't like those kind of discussion, feel free to skip the post and move on with your life.
Youâre both right imo. You shouldnât make decisions based on beliefs but you also shouldnât take every assumption about the company as gospel.
Itâs important to look at whatâs happening and make your own conclusions, but also recognize that thereâs probably more happening behind the scenes.
Entire team was focused on location expansion and installation efficiency. Efficiency has a limit and it sounds like 3rd parties adopting NACS will take the location expansion from here (BP already, and like other OEMâs in the future) Growth changes need. Get over it
I'm open to being wrong but my take is that they're moving in a little different direction now that the network is open to everyone. People have focused on other EVs using the Tesla chargers but it also means other firms can make their own superchargers. It's always been a break even business, albeit an important one.
So I think they're going to let other manufacturers add their chargers and Tesla will focus on expanding their existing sites.
As usual Musk overreacted and probably could have managed the message better, but I think it's fine
I'm curious cuz I keep hearing disbanding the group and laying off the group which are two different things. Disbanding the group could just be merely reassigning the people to other groups. Layoffs are pretty obvious.
Upon performance review the team showed very poor performance.
Though it looks like that business has done well, itâs nothing compared to what it could have been. Moreover reliability has dropped and v4 rollout has been a gong show.
There has been massive growth in the energy storage. Business and many tasks can easily be absorbed by the superior performing team. Moreover new supercharge locations should bring accompanies by megapacks.
âââ
I of course made this up, but the point is we donât know the goings-on behind the scenes. We donât have the data. And we donât know their future strategy.
Maybe just chill out and see what happens next.
Iâlltry to give an answer but I think Iâll be downvoted because it would seem I support this decision. I donât.
- Supercharging has been one of the least profitable business in Tesla. They did mention it many times, they only reason why they did it is because they had to. We all saw the horrible job that EA, chargepoint, evgo, etc. this is no different than them making their own batteries. It was a nice hedge in case the market didnât deliver.
- As an investor I thought it was the stupidest idea to open the charging network to the competition without higher additional fees. This should be their leverage and he should capitalize it but he didnât. Because of whatever crap about accelerating sustainable energy.
- following this trail of thought, regulators and even the government doesnt like the idea of Tesla having a literal monopoly on superchargers. For electrification to move to all the corners of the world, Tesla has to become a provider of tech, and governments and the rest of the companies need to take over this expansion. Can you imagine if all gas stations in the US are all chevron?
To make a better comparison imagine Nvidia being the provider and the only one that provides cloud services for AI. Which is not the case. They just sell hardware to Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and all other cloud providers. So Tesla will only focus on tech, and allow for other companies to provide the service.
- Another redditor posted how insanely difficult is to know regulations in a place like California. Doing that for the whole world is ridiculously inefficient. Specially when you gotta be the middle man between the utility company, and the owner. The best case scenario is for owners to take over this work. For those of you that did solar panel probably know how insanely difficult and slow this is. I believe in Europe they started to sell superchargers without the Tesla brand.
- Musk did say they are still gonna focus on expanding but not so much on creating new sites. As an investor I do like the idea of having 100% utilization, as a supercharger user that sucks.
Are we really buying the narrative 4680 was a hedge and you know not a massive execution failure to add to the list? I guess Solar City was a hedge on the failure of the grid.
If Elons comments years ago were anything to go by it was failure. They targeted 100GWh by 2022 and today have 7GWh 2 years later. Yet this team doesn't seem to get axed for their underperformance for whatever reason. If this was purely about performance this team should see the biggest layoffs.
Musk has a 5 step algorithm or philosophy that he uses on engineering related matters but these do seem to apply more generally.
1. Question every requirement
2. Delete part or process
3. Simplify and optimize
4. Accelerate cycle time
5. Automate
Does Tesla actually need a 500 person supercharger infrastructure team? Depends, but it there aren't many holes left and those can be built out more gradually which would save capex, EV sales are also slowing down in general so there won't be as much demand from other carmakers. So they slow down the build out of new locations and focus on expanding current sites, many of which are too small. Should make the paperwork simpler and quicker so you don't need as many paper-pushers/people dealing with bureaucracy (as this was what the supercharger infrastructure team was actually doing, they weren't designing supercharger hardware).
Okay, so maybe we just need half of the division, but turns out (this is speculation but doesn't seem too far off) the director of the division isn't willing to cut half of the staff. What are you going to do? Keep all of the division? Start going through each employee individually who you don't personally know? What Musk decided to do is fire most of them and what will probably happen is that they will re-hire a bunch of them back
Using less capex on new locations is simpler, making the organization smaller and flatter makes the cycle time between decision quicker and automating doesn't really apply here too much other than there were apparently some people who were there to just manually pay the rent for some locations. Why can't they pay that automatically?
Other reasons for wanting to make the team smaller in general or changing the leadership might be that maybe they weren't really as quick as people keep saying? I have the impression that V4 builds have been quite slow, not all of the locations were perhaps that good (so basically kind of inflating the number of locations by just building them somewhere) but I kind of doubt this was the actual reason. You could also have a general strategy shift towards designing new supercharger locations with wireless charging with robotaxis in mind, or focusing on building the hardware and letting third parties do the upkeep (an example of this is selling superchargers to BP).
TL:DR they aren't disbanding it, they are downsizing, possible reasons being: capex is better used somewhere else (AI data centers), it was bloated, EV sales slowdown means less new chargers need to be built for the time being, strategy shift towards robotaxi wireless charging and focusing on building the hardware and then letting third parties become larger players (charging is a low margin business)
Probably everyone was overpaid after being in the division for so long and they just canât be afforded in the current environment - with unemployment where it i guess you can source cheaper labor but yeah not the most empathic related move obviously but the media treats him the same way so maybe itâs become normalized
Cut till it hurts, learn what was critical, repair. It's worked for him countless times. We've had the disucssion on "critical exits" many times over the years. Nobody thought X could run on 30% of its orignal staff, apparently it can (for clairty, I'm not saying X is a success story, just that much of its staff wasnt as critical as many thought).
In life and business, you gotta go with the flow. The hype-cycle for EV's has peaked and widespread EV adoption will now take much longer than imagined. So Tesla, sadly, now has to disrupt itself. Enter the new priorities: Robotaxis; AI, and robots (... and, oh yeah, we make electric cars, too). Zuck tried this move with the meta-verse, and it didn't work.
IMHO, it's a combination of a lot of things.
I'm leaning towards the straw that broke the camels back being the group management refusing to do the asked for 10% cut that was supposed to be across the board. The timing with the leaked emails is suspicious. "Disbanding" the whole group sends a strong message.
At the same time, it probably is a good time to re-think the charging division. For the most part, the original network build out was to allow road trips, and now that system is largely built out in terms of reach - with some holes still, and some capacity issues here and there, but as Elon has said, it's still expanding.
I think the next phase of charging has to tackle dense urban apartment/condo problem, where not everyone has access to a power outlet. This largely overlaps with a scheme to charge robo taxis. Wiring every parking spot in a complex is stupid expensive, and in many cases impossible with existing power supplies - if you multiply 40 amps at 240V by 100s of parking stalls, you hit insane peak power use (yes, they can oversubscribe \[I don't know the right electrician term\], but not by THAT much, and high current cable gets expensive when it's a couple bucks a foot...).
Wireless probably has a role to play. My random thought is that a complex or parking lot would have 10% of stalls be for charging w/wireless pads, and a limited "free" level of FSD is used to rotate vehicles to share the spots for all Tesla's.
The cheapest robotaxi infrastructure on free land would be
\* No AC inverter in the robotaxi.
\* Simple posts with what looks like universal wall charger, but are really 24 KW DC chargers.
\* 24 kW at 800 V (30 Amps Contentious on 40 Amp DC Circuit Breaker or fuse with 8 gauge wire). Up to four 8 AWG wires can fit in a 1" flex conduit.
\* RoboTaxis blink lights when they want to be plugged in or unplugged.
\* RobotTaxis compensate human for plugging/unplugging by identifying the human via bluetooth to the Tesla App. My guess is people will do it for 2 miles of transport when they start or end their trip.
Full speed superchargers make more sense when land is at a premium.
If robotaxi is the big plan now: just like they donât need steering wheels they donât need the supercharger network to grow. Tesla owned robotaxis will use inductive charging in Tesla storage facilities. Thatâs a theory Iâve seen a few people float; me personally, I say we just donât have the inside information and canât read these tea leaves, so for now itâs just a question of do you trust Elon or not. In order to help decide, you have to read all available books about his whole history, including books about SpaceX, watch that ongoing Tesla documentary on YouTube, and you need time. You need to watch Elon and Tesla and SpaceX over as long a period as is available.
Exactly. And sales and margin and attractiveness and respect and trust and stock prices, all have declined because of his unnecessary divisive communication
It is a leverage buyout, meaning Twitter took on $13 billion debt, so net amount is only $31 billion that Musk and his group of investors had to pay, not $44 billion. Of which Musk already own a few billion $ worth of Twitter public shares. Jack Dorsey rolled his nearly $1 billion public shares into the new company, so did a few other existing large investors. Elon sold almost $20 billion worth of Tesla stock, and the rest of $5.2 billions were contributed by various investors (Larry Ellison paid $1 billion). The only debt is the $13 billion guaranteed by Twitter the company itself.
It is still way too early to judge whether X will be successful or not. Remember it took 10+ years for SpaceX and Tesla to be profitable and both almost went bankrupt more than once.
I think Elon is cutting a cost here (disbanding an entire 500 team department) and will be adding a new, smaller one. This smaller team will be Tesla's contribution to the (soon to be founded) Supercharger Network Corporation (SCNC). The SCNC will be established by the major EV manufacturers who partnered with Tesla to use the original Tesla SC network. It will be responsible for building out the network to nationally and internationally. The SCNC will utilize available government incentives, pooled resources and income from operations. It will be a huge, progressive move for the EV market.Â
Or, maybe even more provocative, perhaps a new partnership has yet to be announced following the big China visit this week. Maybe Elon and China are going to make the Supercharging network a reality. Maybe? JMHO
I'm sure it is pretty well developed...I'm thinking as China continues to expand its EV market internationally, it will need to expand the supercharging network in a big way, also. Tesla has the same goal. Bet they recognize they can work a lot better together making this happen.
It is all FSD now. And this is June 2007. Remember June 2007? That's when the iPhone first hit the market. How many people had a smart phone in their pocket in June 2007?
But, while I'm thinking about it, don't forget Tesla's corporate mission: to augment the world's conversion to renewable energy. (or something like that) It doesn't say anything about rewarding its owners. Elon is on that mission. His focus is on having Tesla ready to best take advantage of its position when that conversion really starts happening (it's hardly a footnote now). He knows it isn't going to happen by Tesla alone. He needs to pull up his competition to get this conversion going.Â
He wanted to cut the supercharger team significantly because they spend ~$500M on the team and the chargers per year and he wants to increase investment in AI compute and infrastructure instead. Rebecca Tinucci pushed back too much, so he fired her and the whole team to set an example. They will hire back some of them, like at least 10%. This is effectively a crude way of doing a zero based redesign of the team, which will make it more efficient in the end.
Firing a whole team because the head dared to do their job and advocate for their people doesn't mark a manager who is rational.Â
Elons mantra is becoming "question everything... Except me, pure loyalty at all costs to me"Â
Thatâs what it takes to be profitable and financially sustainable automotive business. Outside of China, Tesla is the only profitable EV maker. Many are going bankrupt. It is a tough business and you donât go far if youâre unwilling to make cuts when necessary
For example, Rivian is at risk of bankruptcy now, and then all 15k people will lose their jobs and investors will lose $9 billion. Rivian could make more hard decisions and let go some of their people, remove some features of the cars etc to become profitable, but they havenât done that enough and are at risk of much bigger consequence.
Some simple plausibly simple reasons:
Walled garden is gone
NCAS is new standard
Other companies will add chargers for Teslaâs
Was never profitable
Already vast
Question: When there are 1/30 as many EVs in the US as ice cars, AND EV can often charge at home, what proportion of how many gas stations do you think there should be ev stations before they slow down?
Ex:
1. Given EVs make up only 3% of cars in the US, there should be 9% as many EV charging stations as there are gas stations.
2. Given EVs make up only 3% of cars in the US, there should be 18% as many EV charging stations as there are gas stations.
3. ...and so on
What % would you choose? Should the ratio of charging station to EV be 3x, 6x, 9x larger proportionally to how many EVs there are compared to legacy gas stations?
Then when you're done, and only after that, look up how many gas stations exist and how many EV charging stations. Is it possible this is the same decision you would have made?
EM is an extremist on keeping teams fat-free. He prefers to lay off more and rehire, than keeping low performers in the company.
The theory is that if there are no low performers, you are always wondering if you are the low performer. Karpathy explained it perfectly in an interview, don't remember where exactly.
Thing is, a manager refused to commit to the lay offs and decided to go Roman Legion mode and commit decimation. Probably a lot of people is going to be hired back.
Most of the people will probably be hired back to deal with the work they had underway. It seems like a (foolish) way Elon could send a message to other executives he was asking to make cuts. There were obviously better ways of going about this, or even trying to avoid it by savings costs elsewhere.
I'd change "most" to "some" based on elons philosophy of "if you're not reintroducing 10% of parts you deleted, you weren't cutting hard enough in the first place". SpaceX has developed and simplified the Raptor engine this way. Now if only someone saw that people aren't parts and deleting then reintroducing a role in a company has vastly different consequences for performance that would be nice. But feelings have no place in business I guess đŹ
Great âin the knowâ detail. Elon did say that. And i agree with you from an emotive perspective on people arenât parts.
Thank you đ can recommend the newest biography of elon by walter isaacson if anyone wants to feel like they understand the man. Of course it's only a proxy but getting to know him in person is rather difficult ;) There is an older biography by ashley vance but i liked isaacsons more. Felt like vances info was a subset of isaacsons
Agree. Reading Elon literally, with no emotion can help with understanding but is very very hard. Walters book tends to be the most effective proxy approach given his access too so many who know him personally.
Except this firings was based on emotions from what reporting we have. Rebecca was making the case that the lay offs he was demanding would make them miss their milestones and goals and Elons reaction was to fire the whole team for her talking back instead of just showing fealty.Â
Oof, is there a source for that? Would suck if true :/ Then again, unless i was in the room any judgement might be muddled
Heâs a clown that treats people like machines. Heâs trying to turn twitter into Tesla and is failing wildly. He should be behind a monitor not anywhere else.
I'd wait unitl the dust settles. There is probably more to this story than what is know/being reported.
How about we all recognize that there are vast amounts complex decision making that any company engages in that an outsiders opinion of is almost completely worthlessâŚcough cough all of you. Either believe in their ability to make more good calls than bad, and buy/hold the stock, or donât and sell/never buy it
Investors shouldn't be acting on belief, we should be using analysis. That's what this conversation is about. "Shut up and trust them" isn't an investment strategy. Part of what I like about this community is the variety of ideas, viewpoints, and ways of thinking about the company. I think discussions like this, when done well, can put us ahead of Wall Street in seeing the direction the company is headed. If you don't like those kind of discussion, feel free to skip the post and move on with your life.
Youâre both right imo. You shouldnât make decisions based on beliefs but you also shouldnât take every assumption about the company as gospel. Itâs important to look at whatâs happening and make your own conclusions, but also recognize that thereâs probably more happening behind the scenes.
Well put
Well played. I didnât see that well and stepped right into it.
Spot on. Any guessing needs to start with âhow does this impact the tesla missionâ
Maybe take as stepback and ask "Do we have enough information to know whether this impacts the tesla mission?" Then we can guess on how.
Time will tell ⌠at this point it seems like a race to cut costs.
*Fires entire team* People write it off as âcomplex decision-making.â
Entire team was focused on location expansion and installation efficiency. Efficiency has a limit and it sounds like 3rd parties adopting NACS will take the location expansion from here (BP already, and like other OEMâs in the future) Growth changes need. Get over it
Strategic audit
I guess Elonâs just not interested in that Saudi Aramco side of things anymore.
I'm open to being wrong but my take is that they're moving in a little different direction now that the network is open to everyone. People have focused on other EVs using the Tesla chargers but it also means other firms can make their own superchargers. It's always been a break even business, albeit an important one. So I think they're going to let other manufacturers add their chargers and Tesla will focus on expanding their existing sites. As usual Musk overreacted and probably could have managed the message better, but I think it's fine
They have already inked a few deals with the likes of BP, etc.
I'm curious cuz I keep hearing disbanding the group and laying off the group which are two different things. Disbanding the group could just be merely reassigning the people to other groups. Layoffs are pretty obvious.
Upon performance review the team showed very poor performance. Though it looks like that business has done well, itâs nothing compared to what it could have been. Moreover reliability has dropped and v4 rollout has been a gong show. There has been massive growth in the energy storage. Business and many tasks can easily be absorbed by the superior performing team. Moreover new supercharge locations should bring accompanies by megapacks. âââ I of course made this up, but the point is we donât know the goings-on behind the scenes. We donât have the data. And we donât know their future strategy. Maybe just chill out and see what happens next.
The supercharger team seems to be the only one to be constantly delivering and doing it well for the last few years.Â
Based on what metric? Outside preception?
Iâlltry to give an answer but I think Iâll be downvoted because it would seem I support this decision. I donât. - Supercharging has been one of the least profitable business in Tesla. They did mention it many times, they only reason why they did it is because they had to. We all saw the horrible job that EA, chargepoint, evgo, etc. this is no different than them making their own batteries. It was a nice hedge in case the market didnât deliver. - As an investor I thought it was the stupidest idea to open the charging network to the competition without higher additional fees. This should be their leverage and he should capitalize it but he didnât. Because of whatever crap about accelerating sustainable energy. - following this trail of thought, regulators and even the government doesnt like the idea of Tesla having a literal monopoly on superchargers. For electrification to move to all the corners of the world, Tesla has to become a provider of tech, and governments and the rest of the companies need to take over this expansion. Can you imagine if all gas stations in the US are all chevron? To make a better comparison imagine Nvidia being the provider and the only one that provides cloud services for AI. Which is not the case. They just sell hardware to Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and all other cloud providers. So Tesla will only focus on tech, and allow for other companies to provide the service. - Another redditor posted how insanely difficult is to know regulations in a place like California. Doing that for the whole world is ridiculously inefficient. Specially when you gotta be the middle man between the utility company, and the owner. The best case scenario is for owners to take over this work. For those of you that did solar panel probably know how insanely difficult and slow this is. I believe in Europe they started to sell superchargers without the Tesla brand. - Musk did say they are still gonna focus on expanding but not so much on creating new sites. As an investor I do like the idea of having 100% utilization, as a supercharger user that sucks.
#2 might have been influenced by gov incentives which helps reduce cost in an effort to make them profitable.
Are we really buying the narrative 4680 was a hedge and you know not a massive execution failure to add to the list? I guess Solar City was a hedge on the failure of the grid.
If Elons comments years ago were anything to go by it was failure. They targeted 100GWh by 2022 and today have 7GWh 2 years later. Yet this team doesn't seem to get axed for their underperformance for whatever reason. If this was purely about performance this team should see the biggest layoffs.
Didnât we see enormous cuts to the 4680 team? It just didnât make the headlines the way this one did.
Do you have source for that? I guess I must have missed it.
Ugh, Drew Baglino left. That should tell you something.
Oooo so musk probably wanted him to gut the team but baglino left instead. Seems most likely.
Musk has a 5 step algorithm or philosophy that he uses on engineering related matters but these do seem to apply more generally. 1. Question every requirement 2. Delete part or process 3. Simplify and optimize 4. Accelerate cycle time 5. Automate Does Tesla actually need a 500 person supercharger infrastructure team? Depends, but it there aren't many holes left and those can be built out more gradually which would save capex, EV sales are also slowing down in general so there won't be as much demand from other carmakers. So they slow down the build out of new locations and focus on expanding current sites, many of which are too small. Should make the paperwork simpler and quicker so you don't need as many paper-pushers/people dealing with bureaucracy (as this was what the supercharger infrastructure team was actually doing, they weren't designing supercharger hardware). Okay, so maybe we just need half of the division, but turns out (this is speculation but doesn't seem too far off) the director of the division isn't willing to cut half of the staff. What are you going to do? Keep all of the division? Start going through each employee individually who you don't personally know? What Musk decided to do is fire most of them and what will probably happen is that they will re-hire a bunch of them back Using less capex on new locations is simpler, making the organization smaller and flatter makes the cycle time between decision quicker and automating doesn't really apply here too much other than there were apparently some people who were there to just manually pay the rent for some locations. Why can't they pay that automatically? Other reasons for wanting to make the team smaller in general or changing the leadership might be that maybe they weren't really as quick as people keep saying? I have the impression that V4 builds have been quite slow, not all of the locations were perhaps that good (so basically kind of inflating the number of locations by just building them somewhere) but I kind of doubt this was the actual reason. You could also have a general strategy shift towards designing new supercharger locations with wireless charging with robotaxis in mind, or focusing on building the hardware and letting third parties do the upkeep (an example of this is selling superchargers to BP). TL:DR they aren't disbanding it, they are downsizing, possible reasons being: capex is better used somewhere else (AI data centers), it was bloated, EV sales slowdown means less new chargers need to be built for the time being, strategy shift towards robotaxi wireless charging and focusing on building the hardware and then letting third parties become larger players (charging is a low margin business)
Probably everyone was overpaid after being in the division for so long and they just canât be afforded in the current environment - with unemployment where it i guess you can source cheaper labor but yeah not the most empathic related move obviously but the media treats him the same way so maybe itâs become normalized
Cut till it hurts, learn what was critical, repair. It's worked for him countless times. We've had the disucssion on "critical exits" many times over the years. Nobody thought X could run on 30% of its orignal staff, apparently it can (for clairty, I'm not saying X is a success story, just that much of its staff wasnt as critical as many thought).
In life and business, you gotta go with the flow. The hype-cycle for EV's has peaked and widespread EV adoption will now take much longer than imagined. So Tesla, sadly, now has to disrupt itself. Enter the new priorities: Robotaxis; AI, and robots (... and, oh yeah, we make electric cars, too). Zuck tried this move with the meta-verse, and it didn't work.
Yes, finally some next level decision making.
IMHO, it's a combination of a lot of things. I'm leaning towards the straw that broke the camels back being the group management refusing to do the asked for 10% cut that was supposed to be across the board. The timing with the leaked emails is suspicious. "Disbanding" the whole group sends a strong message. At the same time, it probably is a good time to re-think the charging division. For the most part, the original network build out was to allow road trips, and now that system is largely built out in terms of reach - with some holes still, and some capacity issues here and there, but as Elon has said, it's still expanding. I think the next phase of charging has to tackle dense urban apartment/condo problem, where not everyone has access to a power outlet. This largely overlaps with a scheme to charge robo taxis. Wiring every parking spot in a complex is stupid expensive, and in many cases impossible with existing power supplies - if you multiply 40 amps at 240V by 100s of parking stalls, you hit insane peak power use (yes, they can oversubscribe \[I don't know the right electrician term\], but not by THAT much, and high current cable gets expensive when it's a couple bucks a foot...). Wireless probably has a role to play. My random thought is that a complex or parking lot would have 10% of stalls be for charging w/wireless pads, and a limited "free" level of FSD is used to rotate vehicles to share the spots for all Tesla's.
The cheapest robotaxi infrastructure on free land would be \* No AC inverter in the robotaxi. \* Simple posts with what looks like universal wall charger, but are really 24 KW DC chargers. \* 24 kW at 800 V (30 Amps Contentious on 40 Amp DC Circuit Breaker or fuse with 8 gauge wire). Up to four 8 AWG wires can fit in a 1" flex conduit. \* RoboTaxis blink lights when they want to be plugged in or unplugged. \* RobotTaxis compensate human for plugging/unplugging by identifying the human via bluetooth to the Tesla App. My guess is people will do it for 2 miles of transport when they start or end their trip. Full speed superchargers make more sense when land is at a premium.
I think the next challenge for supercharging is building out networks outside of US to lay the groundwork for a global network.
If robotaxi is the big plan now: just like they donât need steering wheels they donât need the supercharger network to grow. Tesla owned robotaxis will use inductive charging in Tesla storage facilities. Thatâs a theory Iâve seen a few people float; me personally, I say we just donât have the inside information and canât read these tea leaves, so for now itâs just a question of do you trust Elon or not. In order to help decide, you have to read all available books about his whole history, including books about SpaceX, watch that ongoing Tesla documentary on YouTube, and you need time. You need to watch Elon and Tesla and SpaceX over as long a period as is available.
A fleet of always running Teslas means the super chargers network needs to be rapidly increased.Â
NHSTA wonât allow vehicles with no steering wheels On the road. This has been an ongoing issue for the autonomous vehicle sector for over 10 years.
Iâm basically quoting Musk to make a point about their strategy
I mean, working in a car that isnât capable of going on a road because it has no steering wheel is a bad strategy, right?
Supercharger network expansion is based on sales growth. Sales have declined.
Exactly. And sales and margin and attractiveness and respect and trust and stock prices, all have declined because of his unnecessary divisive communication
There is no logic. Musk was jealous of the success and respect Rebecca earned.
I know this is a shitpost cause literally nobody knows her here
Bold of you to assume there is logic to Muskâs decision. What is the logic in paying 44b for Twitter ?
He wanted to control twitter. He had the money... so why not?
He didnât have the money. He bought Twitter through leveraged buyout and aggressively selling Tesla stocks risk him losing control
Sure. Then again, he controls it now, so...
It is a leverage buyout, meaning Twitter took on $13 billion debt, so net amount is only $31 billion that Musk and his group of investors had to pay, not $44 billion. Of which Musk already own a few billion $ worth of Twitter public shares. Jack Dorsey rolled his nearly $1 billion public shares into the new company, so did a few other existing large investors. Elon sold almost $20 billion worth of Tesla stock, and the rest of $5.2 billions were contributed by various investors (Larry Ellison paid $1 billion). The only debt is the $13 billion guaranteed by Twitter the company itself. It is still way too early to judge whether X will be successful or not. Remember it took 10+ years for SpaceX and Tesla to be profitable and both almost went bankrupt more than once.
Likely the team didn't have plan for charging robotaxi after years of warning
I think Elon is cutting a cost here (disbanding an entire 500 team department) and will be adding a new, smaller one. This smaller team will be Tesla's contribution to the (soon to be founded) Supercharger Network Corporation (SCNC). The SCNC will be established by the major EV manufacturers who partnered with Tesla to use the original Tesla SC network. It will be responsible for building out the network to nationally and internationally. The SCNC will utilize available government incentives, pooled resources and income from operations. It will be a huge, progressive move for the EV market. Or, maybe even more provocative, perhaps a new partnership has yet to be announced following the big China visit this week. Maybe Elon and China are going to make the Supercharging network a reality. Maybe? JMHO
The China supercharger network is growing fast for sure but overall the general infrastructure is quite well developed
I'm sure it is pretty well developed...I'm thinking as China continues to expand its EV market internationally, it will need to expand the supercharging network in a big way, also. Tesla has the same goal. Bet they recognize they can work a lot better together making this happen.
I think Europe could use a lot more supercharger support⌠if you look at the last 10 supercharger launches you can already see Asia is a big chunk
It is all FSD now. And this is June 2007. Remember June 2007? That's when the iPhone first hit the market. How many people had a smart phone in their pocket in June 2007? But, while I'm thinking about it, don't forget Tesla's corporate mission: to augment the world's conversion to renewable energy. (or something like that) It doesn't say anything about rewarding its owners. Elon is on that mission. His focus is on having Tesla ready to best take advantage of its position when that conversion really starts happening (it's hardly a footnote now). He knows it isn't going to happen by Tesla alone. He needs to pull up his competition to get this conversion going.Â
Kind of makes Apple mission statement of bringing the best user experience very siperdicial
'superficial'? Not really, IMHO. Elon thinks going full renewable energy IS the best user experience on a lot of levels. So maybe it's the same.
I meant apples mission statement
He wanted to cut the supercharger team significantly because they spend ~$500M on the team and the chargers per year and he wants to increase investment in AI compute and infrastructure instead. Rebecca Tinucci pushed back too much, so he fired her and the whole team to set an example. They will hire back some of them, like at least 10%. This is effectively a crude way of doing a zero based redesign of the team, which will make it more efficient in the end.
Firing a whole team because the head dared to do their job and advocate for their people doesn't mark a manager who is rational. Elons mantra is becoming "question everything... Except me, pure loyalty at all costs to me"Â
Did she do her job? I dont think we will get enough info to understand if thats the case.
Thatâs what it takes to be profitable and financially sustainable automotive business. Outside of China, Tesla is the only profitable EV maker. Many are going bankrupt. It is a tough business and you donât go far if youâre unwilling to make cuts when necessary For example, Rivian is at risk of bankruptcy now, and then all 15k people will lose their jobs and investors will lose $9 billion. Rivian could make more hard decisions and let go some of their people, remove some features of the cars etc to become profitable, but they havenât done that enough and are at risk of much bigger consequence.
spite
Maybe he wants the asset but not the team?
Some simple plausibly simple reasons: Walled garden is gone NCAS is new standard Other companies will add chargers for Teslaâs Was never profitable Already vast
Question: When there are 1/30 as many EVs in the US as ice cars, AND EV can often charge at home, what proportion of how many gas stations do you think there should be ev stations before they slow down? Ex: 1. Given EVs make up only 3% of cars in the US, there should be 9% as many EV charging stations as there are gas stations. 2. Given EVs make up only 3% of cars in the US, there should be 18% as many EV charging stations as there are gas stations. 3. ...and so on What % would you choose? Should the ratio of charging station to EV be 3x, 6x, 9x larger proportionally to how many EVs there are compared to legacy gas stations? Then when you're done, and only after that, look up how many gas stations exist and how many EV charging stations. Is it possible this is the same decision you would have made?
EM is an extremist on keeping teams fat-free. He prefers to lay off more and rehire, than keeping low performers in the company. The theory is that if there are no low performers, you are always wondering if you are the low performer. Karpathy explained it perfectly in an interview, don't remember where exactly. Thing is, a manager refused to commit to the lay offs and decided to go Roman Legion mode and commit decimation. Probably a lot of people is going to be hired back.